Judge cracks down on Oakland hotels (over prostitution)

Source: SF Chronicle

(10-07) 18:33 PDT OAKLAND -- An Alameda County Superior Court judge has imposed strict restrictions on three notorious Oakland hotels that city officials have been trying to shut down for catering to prostitution.

Judge Brenda Harbin-Forte found the hotels are a "nuisance in the form of prostitution-related activities" to the extent that they create "grave and irreparable harm to the public."

A trial to shut the hotels down is scheduled for Feb. 10, 2012. But in the interim, Harbin-Forte imposed a preliminary injunction that requires measures such as installation of 8-foot fences. The owners must also install cameras to record the faces of everyone on the property and that data must be made available to city officials.

Hotel owners will be banned from renting to a list of known johns and pimps. The license plates of cars on the property will have to be documented, unregistered guests will be banned from loitering and no room can have more than two guests per day.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/07/BAH31LF0LA.DTL

were all Indian.

I used to work in a hotel and from what I gathered from my boss who attended many conventions, Indians and other Asians make up a HUGE segment of the nation's hotel and motel owners. If one were to randomly toss darts at a list of hotel owners, it is likely that someone with an Eastern name would be hit.

Sadly, the two worst hotels in our area are (or were) Indian-owned. I say "sadly" because the sleazy way in which they ran their operations just perpetuated whatever negative stereotypes are held by the local Bircher morons.

I really don't see the significance of the possible Indian or Pakistani ownership of the hotels in the article, attaching no more weight to this than if the article was about East Coast accounting firms whose owners were named Steinberg, Cohen or Schwartzman.

Or how about even a few payday loan places? I know it's off-topic, but I have to scoff at terms like, "grave and irreparable harm," when applied to prostitution, which, if it has been harming irreparably for eight thousand years, would have ended the world long before now.

I used to travel for my job years ago and my usual hotel, as well as my back-up hotels were all booked and the only thing I could find was the Hampton Inn. Between the open the door, close the door, come down the hallway drunk and loud and the moans of passion on BOTH sides of my room, well, let's just say I didn't get much sleep.